New Imperialists : Ideologies of Empire

The men whom Zeus decrees, from youth to old age,
must wind down our brutal wars to the bitter end
until we drop and die, down to the last man. 34
This cultural current, however, did not translate into a resignation about
war and empire among most Greek intellectuals. The general thrust of
their observations strongly suggests that they often regarded war as a
sickness. This strain of ancient criticism is evident in Euripides’ The
Women of Troy. As the drama opens the god Poseidon mourns the sacking
of Troy, thereby recasting the greatest event of the past as the greatest
occasion of sorrow and misery,:
How are ye blind,
Ye treaders down of cities, ye that cast
Temples to desolation, and lay waste
Tombs, the untrodden sanctuaries where lie
The ancient dead; yourselves so soon to die! 35
WORKMAN: When Might is Right 149
Writing in the same period, the comic poet Aristophanes claimed that a
permanent peace from generation to generation is both natural and
possible. In the Acharnians, the first of his famous peace plays that
include The Peace and Lysistrata, the protagonist Dicaeopolis (broadly
meaning just city) has just been presented with three options for a private
peace with Sparta – imagine a play about a farmer from Nebraska negotiating
a private peace with Saddam Hussein! Each peace offering appears
metaphorically in the form of a wine:
Dicaeopolis: You’ve got the peaces?
Amphitheus: Yes, here they are – three of them – taste them. This
one is for five years. Have a sip.
Dicaeopolis: Ugh! [He spits out the wine and thrusts the skin from
him]
Amphitheus: What’s wrong?
Dicaeopolis: It’s nauseating! It simply reeks of turpentine and
shipyards.
Amphitheus: [offering him the second, larger skin] Well, try the
ten-year one.
Dicaeopolis: [after tasting it] No, this one is too acid. More diplomatic
missions, I bet, and trying to get the allies to send troops
for when the fighting starts again.